The present invention is directed to the use of computers in writing Geez or Ethiopic, which is the alphabet on which Ethiopian writing is based. Ethiopic or Geez is one of the world's most ancient alphabets and languages. According to the beliefs of the Ethiopian Orthodox church, Ethiopic has a special place in biblical history. The first human to use the alphabet is believed to be Henoch of the Old Testament. Henoch, the Seventh in line from Adam and Eve and the great grandfather of Noah supposedly wrote the Book of Enoch in Ethiopic. Ethiopic is an ebugida meaning that each symbol represents a consonant and vowel combination. The symbols are organized into classes and orders of similar symbols, which are associated with similar sounds. The symbols are organized on the basis of both the consonant and the vowel. Ethiopic is written left to right across the page. These Ethiopic characters have evolved over time from more ancient forms.
There is archeological evidence that the proto-Ethiopic alphabet existed before the 9th century BC especially during the D'mt Kingdom in Northern Ethiopia. The ancient character set existed as the Heleheme series having only a first order. The first and last syllographs of Geez, He and Pe are relatively the same in Ancient Egypt as the first and last main Hieroglyphs. The order of the Geez system has remained the same for roughly 3000 years. Some believe that the first character set was an ebugida. Others even claim that the classic Ethiopic with its seven vowel expansions was in existence before 3000 BC. Still others claim that Ethiopic is a Sabean alphabet. It is thought by some that it was during the Axumite Kingdom of around 340 AD that the alphabet gained the vowel forms and started to be written from left to right.
Translation of Bible books into Ethiopic, the ancient Semitic language, contributed to the development of the syllabic alphabet. Gradually, the Geez language started to die out and now remains as a liturgical language of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church. Around the 13th century AD, Amharic became the dominant language. As a result, more characters were added to Geez primarily through the influence of the Hamitic languages. In the 1800's the Bible was translated to Amharic and later to Tigrigna and Oromo languages. Since then Ethiopic has added more characters as more languages began using it.
The introduction of the printing press around 1900 encouraged the proliferation of books. Books and newspapers were printed using type-setting technology. Type-setting provided a fairly faithful reproduction of the Ethiopic characters, which prior to the introduction of the printing press, were written by hand. Around 1920 Ayana Birru introduced the Amharic typewriter, which consisted of a modification of the printhead of the familiar English typewriter. While the Amharic typewriter allowed for a widespread production of printed documents, it was not without drawbacks. In particular, using the Amharic typewriter, glyphs were produced by a complicated series of the partial glyphs successively typed over the top of each other. The glyphs thus produced were merely an approximation of the true hand-written Ethiopic characters, which were more faithfully reproduced by a printing press. Thus, despite its utility, the Amharic typewriter, led to the proliferation of sub-standard characters and incomplete Amharic sets.
With the advent of computer technology, it became possible to efficiently produce printed documents having Ethiopic characters without the use of the a printing press. Early attempts at adopting computer technology for this purpose, did not use the true Ethiopic characters, but instead used glyphs similar to those produced by the Amharic typewriter. Accordingly, the full range and variety of Ethiopic characters were not expressed. Concurrently, Dr. Aberra Molla, developed a method of rendering a greater variety of Ethiopic characters. Dr. Molla's method included using the function keys to alter the font in which a default character is rendered. The different fonts indicated, by convention, that different character orders were specified. Switching between languages was with one or two keystrokes.
With improvements to computer technology, it became possible to more faithfully render the true Ethiopic characters. While the problem of rendering true characters had been solved, the problem remained of specifying all the characters using the standard QWERTY keyboard. In particular, Ethiopic has approximately 564 characters, all of which cannot be typed using a standard keyboard, which has far fewer keys. Several schemes have been developed to address this problem. All the schemes developed so far are complicated and non-intuitive and require a great many keystrokes per character. Examples of these Amharic typing schemes can be found online. Accordingly it would be desirable to have an improved system for entering Ethiopic characters into a computer using a standard QWERTY keyboard.